by David Wann
Nevertheless, there’s something very powerful, very transforming, about watching a great movie in the company of hundreds of other people, even if you have to wear a jacket in the summertime or push Kleenex into your ears to protect your hearing. Together, we react to the same stories and images and learn something new about life, and about each other. We may as well be a clan of hunter-gatherers sitting around a campfire, telling stories. Says Don Norman, author of Things That Make Us Smart, “Stories are important cognitive events because they encapsulate information, knowledge, context, and emotion in one compact package.” I firmly believe that well-made documentary films can change the course of history. They remind us that information can be fascinating, useful, stimulating, and sometimes refreshingly conspiratorial. For example, from Roger and Me through Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, Michael Moore’s films make us think about the politics of human behavior. The PBS program Affluenza, produced by John de Graaf (before we collaborated on a book with the same title), made me stand up at the end and comment to friends, “That’s the best TV I’ve seen in years.” Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, was also an eye-opener.
In recent years, as evidence that our culture is changing, some beautifully poignant documentaries about nature have done very well in mainstream theaters, giving audiences a collective sense that humans are only one heroic species among millions. Winged Migration is an epic filmmaking effort that required a crew of 450 people, including 17 pilots and 14 cinematographers, to follow flocks of migrating birds across all seven continents in planes, gliders, helicopters, and hot air balloons. The audience applauded enthusiastically at the end, as they did at the conclusion of March of the Penguins, a brilliant, Academy Award-winning film about the talents, trials, and tribulations of emperor penguins (and we thought our lifestyle was challenging!). In films like Microcosmos, The Wild Chimpanzees, and The Wild Parrots of Paragraph Hill, we come to know the daily delights and discomforts of penguins, storks, chimps, beetles, parrots, and other animals, and we realize at a deeper level that the world’s other species are trying to live joyful lives, too. In the absence of widely understood ecological knowledge about the valuable role each species plays, probably only empathy will motivate us to preserve the habitats where so many animals and plants are struggling. We need to imagine them with the faces of our dogs and cats. As scientist and author Donella Meadows asked so poignantly before she died, “Since the Earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature’s diversity is gone?”
Toxic Information Cleanup
A friend of mine, Dan Chiras, answered the phone not long ago and found out that the Texas Board of Education had blacklisted a textbook he wrote, Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Future, because it was thought to be “out of line with both Christian and free enterprise principles.” Dan decided to contest the decision, and the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice brought a lawsuit against the board on his behalf. David Bradley, one of the board members named in the suit, was “disappointed” with the way the environmental science textbook portrayed the American economy and the free-enterprise system. He also didn’t like negative implications about the petrochemical industry and offshore drilling, predominant industries in the Texas economy. “Maybe those people out there in Berkeley like it, but not here in Texas,” he said. Chiras had written that air quality was unhealthy in a large number of American cities, using data generated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The board suggested that the author tone down statements such as this, which he refused to do despite the loss of the largest textbook market in the country after California.5
Bradley also cited sections in the book that showed panoramic views of housing developments and detailed the environmental impacts of them. “I’m in real estate,” Bradley said. “I see a picture like that and I see $350,000 homes; I see mortgage bankers; I see carpenters; I see jobs. I see a tax base.”6
It’s what he doesn’t see that hurts us. He doesn’t see asthma victims of air pollution trying to get to the emergency wing at the hospital, or fish flipping on a riverbank, poisoned by chemical runoff from toxic lawns. His mental dictionary doesn’t yet acknowledge the term “global warming,” so he doesn’t worry about how much energy those homes use. And he doesn’t think about the acre of forest that was cut down to build each house, or how woefully inefficient most residents’ much-driven cars are. He doesn’t think about the fact that beneath the economic bottom line the far more tangible ecological bottom line is rapidly being dismantled.
We need to draw the line; to make sure we get information without contamination. As a starting point, let’s make a clear distinction between political freedom of speech and commercial freedom of speech. As citizens in a democracy that requires our informed participation, we have a right and obligation to retain control of our own brain. The problem with bought information is that it takes too much time, energy, and focus to find the signal amid the noise, distracting us from looking at value in a wider sense. The most dangerous aspect of junk information may be that it lowers our ability to trust. Since advertisers are expected to make false claims to make money, how can we trust them, or anyone else who’s just in it for the money? In the case of soaps, snack foods, cars, and all the rest, if a product is excellent, shouldn’t word of mouth sell it? Consumer Reports and Ralph Nader were pioneers in supplying information we can use. Other innovators like Amazon and Netflix provide customer-rating systems that help others evaluate the value of a product. It may sound radical in our hyped-up world to consider banning advertising, but it’s quite possible—and quite necessary—to find a higher purpose for our brain than soaking up mind-numbing jingles, posters, and fake testimonials. We have more important work, and play, to do.
Why not regulate all advertising the way we’ve regulated the cigarette and alcohol industries? Why not tax advertising in general, over a certain monetary limit? Companies will either cut back on advertising to save money, or the taxes they pay will help purchase open space or build new centers for performing arts. A similar strategy is used in some state lottery laws. For example, Colorado’s GOCO regulations allot a certain percentage of lottery revenues for recreational uses of land.
In the case of TV, why not reclaim public oversight of the airwaves, charging broadcasters higher fees to use them? This is an especially hot button for me right now, after a company called Lake Cedar Group forced my hometown to accept the installation of a 9-million-watt “supertower” to broadcast HDTV, despite potential health effects and the availability of more remote, safer sites. How did they do it? By running TV ads in the Denver Metro area over and over that chastised “a small group of people” for obstructing the public’s right to have HDTV. Just before a Congressional recess, a bill that overrides local control of land was tucked into a whole package of bills, quickly pushed through Congress, and rubber-stamped by the president. A bit of research on the Web revealed that at least one of the senators who introduced the bill, Ken Salazar, had received a $20,000 campaign contribution from Lake Cedar Group’s legal firm. Is TV more important than local land use rights and the well-being of people?7
Telling a New Story: Information We Can Use
I believe we need to use a martial arts approach to redirect the awesome power of the media. They are already scrambling for market share—newspapers are taking shelter on the web and companies like Sony are selling devices that enable TVs to access the Internet; network TV producers are scrambling to become as innovative as cable TV producers, who are hiring YouTube freelancers to teach them what the younger generation wants. Book publishers are tracking the reasons why we’re reading less literature (a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts documents an overall decline of 10 percent in the last twenty years). Now’s the time to vote with our credit cards and the clicks of our computer mouse, showing those that gather such data that we want information we can use?
We are at a turning point with our
infinite supplies of information, similar to a child who’s learned to speak. Having mastered the technology of talking, the child must now figure out what she or he wants to say. To reduce consumption, we need to tell an ingenious story about the incredible value of nature, social connection, cultural richness, and human creativity. The new story is also about substituting information for resource use. In Earth in Mind, educator David Orr advocates transforming knowledge into products, cities, and systems that fit nature like a hand fits a glove: “Ecological design requires the ability to comprehend patterns that connect, which means getting beyond the boxes we call disciplines to see things in their ecological context.”8
The term “value added,” as used in the business world, refers to taking raw materials and shaping them into products. Yet, as many indigenous populations as well as enlightened economists know full well, it’s also critically important to retain value. One great example is the decision New York City made in the 1990s. Required by U.S. EPA to provide safer drinking water for its nine million residents, city engineers and scientists were at a crossroads: either build a huge water treatment plant or preserve the natural purification assets of the upstate watershed, where the water comes from. They wisely chose nature over expensive, high-maintenance technology, saving more than $5 billion just for construction.
As naturalist Edward Abbey once said, “We must learn to think not only logically, but biologically.” Movies, documentaries, journalism, literature, the Internet, and TV can help shift our thoughts; and nature can serve as a model. Mature ecosystems use nutrients much more efficiently and are more diverse, cooperative, and weblike than immature, wasteful systems, whose species haven’t yet coevolved resource conserving designs and approaches. Similarly, a more mature version of our economy will accommodate diversity and local strengths, focusing on preserving nature rather than dismantling it; and tapping into its renewable flows and cycles, like wind, sun, decomposition, water and air purification, natural pest control, pollination, and so on. This is what futurist Lester Brown calls the “eco-economy,” which relies on information and innovation to restore ecological systems like wetlands, produce biofuels and bioplastics, recycle and compost materials that are specifically designed to break down, and in general, substitute efficiency for waste. The new story is not just about economic growth—which often generates fear and insecurity—but human growth and natural regeneration, which generates joy.
The American public is hungry for a sense of mission, and the media can give it shape. By tuning out junk media and tuning in stimulating, coherent media, we can emerge from this gooey pupa we are currently trapped in to become a nature-friendly, butterfly culture.
For example, by acting quickly to prevent the worst effects of global warming, we can save huge amounts of money and prevent unimaginable misery, too. A recent British study estimated that the annual cost of climate change to Britons will eventually exceed hundreds of billions of dollars, and that it will be far less expensive and inconvenient to limit greenhouse gases than deal with the impacts later. Stalled, or faulty, information prevents political consensus and action. In the documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore points out that there were more than six hundred articles about global warming in the popular press from 1991 to 2005, 53 percent of which presented global warming as unproven. However, in 928 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, scientists were unanimous in their certainty that human activities are a primary cause. The discrepancy comes from a perceived need to present both sides of an issue in newspapers, magazines, and other media—especially if one side brings money. In many cases, the experts who dispute that humans cause global warming received funds from the fossil fuel industry, a primary sponsor of the media.
A recent issue of Yes! Magazine (a perfect example of butterfly media), Co-op America’s Alisa Gravitz gives us information we can use: a very achievable Ten-Step program for reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. The steps, to be achieved by 2054, include:
• Double vehicle efficiency
• Reduce vehicle miles traveled
• Increase appliance and building efficiency to reduce energy use in buildings by 25 percent
• Eliminate tropical deforestation and increase replanting
• Increase organic agriculture to stop soil erosion
• Increase wind power seventy-five-fold over current capacity; increase solar power a thousand-fold over current capacity
• Double the efficiency of coal-fired power plants with no net increase in coal-generated electricity (for each new plant, take an old one out of service)
• Increase natural gas-fired generating capacity fourfold to replace coal plants as a temporary measure
• Develop fuels from biological waste (not crops)
• Capture and sequester CO2 at existing coal plants
• Develop super-efficient plug-in hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles powered by renewable energy.9
Says Gravitz, “Just doing seven of the ten steps perfectly would at least keep emissions at current levels, rather than doubling by mid-century, as is projected.”
In our everyday lives, we can substitute information for consumption by purchasing products that use fewer materials in their packaging, that are recyclable and durable, and that provide the service precisely—with no wasted energy or materials. In fact, the new story is largely about events that happen right in our daily lives: the way we prepare meals, stay warm, travel to a concert, design new clothing and new buildings, and treat each other. It’s about cooperating to use information wisely rather than wasting it. It’s about creating a country-scale suggestion box that chooses which technologies will deliver the most value, overall. We can even vote in our own backyards, by planting “biointensive” gardens that use profound knowledge and skill to optimize every square foot of garden space. By allowing useful information into our brain, we can support new policies and new technologies that result in more pedestrian-friendly communities, and information-rich innovations like “living machines.” The living machine is an alternative way to treat wastewater—which we all are responsible for. It mimics the natural intelligence of a wetland, treating human or industrial wastes with snails, fish, flowers, cattails, and other living things.
Similarly, a whole new universe of natural solutions is waiting for us if we study the way other species meet their needs—without any monetary system at all! Says biologist Janine Benyus, “Life shows us there’s plenty to go around.” Benyus reports on innovations in the fascinating world of “biomimicry” (see her book of the same title). By studying how the lotus leaf stays clean without detergents (a bumpy surface that doesn’t enable dirt to accumulate), engineers have invented bio-inspired, bumpy-layered paints. By seeing how peacocks and Morphos butterflies create pigment without dyes (they use transparent layers to refract light), we learn how to make our world more colorful, naturally. Although our primitive technologies use a philosophy of “heat, beat, and treat,” which leaves piles of waste behind, the abalone shell self-assembles layer by layer, without any waste—selecting minerals from the palette in seawater. In the same way that the cocklebur inspired Velcro technology, we can learn how nature lubricates, communicates, recycles materials, purifies water, weaves silk, muffles sound, reduces friction, repels microbes, and heals itself. “From A to Z—amoeba to zebra—nature has already compiled the information we need,” asserts Benyus.10
If we are smart enough to redirect the flow of information, we can learn to create a benign economy that doesn’t require so much money; that creates wealth—real wealth—the way a bee creates honey. Without harming the flower.
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Historical Dividends
New Rules for an Old Game
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone.
—John Maynard Keynes
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress o
f the human mind. As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
—Thomas Jefferson
When money is plenty this is a man’s world. When money is scarce it is a woman’s world. When all else seems to have failed, the woman’s instinct comes in.
—Ladies Home Journal, 1932
According to “reporters” at the satirical newspaper The Onion, nearly nine out of ten Americans are “tired of having a country.” Onion reporters write, “Among the 86 percent of poll respondents who were in favor of discontinuing the nation, the most frequently cited reasons were a lack of significant results from the current democratic process (36 percent), dissatisfaction with customer service (28 percent), and exhaustion (22 percent). Many said they believe that having a country is ‘counter to the best interests of Americans,’ and that ‘the time and effort citizens spend on the country could be better spent elsewhere.’ Eight percent said they just didn’t care. Wilmington, DE, accountant Karie Ashworth said, ‘I don’t want to get bogged down in the country anymore,’ and Olympia, WA, student Helen Berg, expressing frustration with the country’s voting process, said, ‘I was gonna vote, but it rained. It wasn’t for the president anyway, so what difference does it make?’”1
